July 10 to September 18, 2021
1395 Boston Corners Rd, Millerton, NY 12546
thereinstitute.com

“Only connect,” E.M. Forster once famously wrote. How many times in the last year and a half have we heard the declaration, “We are all connected,” despite a period forever defined by the intolerable hardship of “social distancing,” when many families suffered enforced separation from their loved ones, and many people tragically died alone? The global pandemic has dramatically proven that our categorical “connection” is both a bane and a boon—while we can potentially all infect each other, we can—and must—also attempt to reach out to each other.

Brenda Zlamany’s extraordinary array of 500 portraits in The Itinerant Portraitist, on view through September 18 at the Re Institute in Millerton, New York, provides a powerful and poignant testament to our connected humanity. In an era when selfishness, and the “selfie” have ruled, her work, going back a decade, redefines the contemporary notion of “face time.” Indeed, one could consider each of the individual faces in her myriad, rainbow coalition of physiognomies, the ultimate un-selfie.

Zlamany’s pictorial project began in 2011, funded by a Fulbright grant. The earliest works in the show were done in over 30 aboriginal villages in Taiwan, which she visited with her young daughter, Oona. The artist travelled light: Zlamany, an accomplished oil painter whose commissioned work is on permanent display at Yale University, stripped her practice down to the bare and portable minimum; paper, pencil and watercolors.

Aided by a time-honored tool, an old-fashioned camera lucida –a technique she learned from David Hockney, a close friend whom she met when she worked as a printmaker in the 1980s- Zlamany sits face to face with her subject and sketches a basic outline. Then, over the course of a single hour, during which she sensitively but persistently prompts her sitter to divulge deeply personal stories, she finishes the form, rendering the portrait in quick, expressive watercolor strokes. Think of it as speed portrait painting (a much more intimate interaction than speed dating.) The subject, while the focal point, is also engaged in a kind of confessional. “I am trying to capture something that happens between us over the hour of listening to them,” Zlamany says.

The completed portraits brim with life in all its stages, from cradle to grave. But they also serve as a memento mori. They are quintessentially ephemeral, a delicate layer of pigment on paper that captures a fleeting moment of time. Zlamany’s chosen medium and technique perfectly convey the transience of human life.

The exhibit has been divided into groups of portraits of indigenous people living in far flung locations, from Alaska to Saudi Arabia, from the Hebrew Home for the Aged in Riverdale, New York, to the sunny vineyards of Sonoma, California. They include Cuban taxi drivers, Alaskan national park rangers , girls from an Abu Dhabi orphanage, and New York art world denizens. They start with infants, and move on to the very old, one of whom died the day she was painted.

The approach is egalitarian. “Art is a like an elevator,” the artist says, “And I wanted to stop on every floor. Everyone has a chance to get involved.” At the end of each session, Zlamany documents it with a photograph of the subject proudly holding their own portrait, which they, rather than the artist, has signed.

The exhibit begins with a bang: an enormous image of Noura, an Arab woman in a hijab, proudly festooned on the entrance to the vintage red barn that houses the gallery. (And sure to provoke local Trumpsters.) Inside the gallery, the walls are papered with rows and rows of hundreds of faces, cheek by jowl, creating a tessellated effect. The hanging isn’t random but organized so that the various indigenous groups are differentiated by the dominant colors in their portraits. Alaska, for instance, includes images mostly done in green; Saudi Arabia mostly done in black. The first impression of this vast display is overwhelming, but soon the eye focuses on the individual faces, in all their many differences.

As she travelled to more than a dozen destinations over the last decade, Zlamany clearly honed her craft. One of the first images, of a sleeping baby, is tentative and impressionistic, the artist’s brush barely grazing the page. By the time she painted the images of the elderly in the Hebrew Home, done in 2017, Zlamany has mastered her form, creating decisive works that powerfully portray her subjects, simultaneously signaling the political and social implications of their specific habitats (climate change, for instance, as seen in Alaska and Sonoma wine country; the quality of life in nursing homes.)

Covid-induced masking also provided Zlamany with fertile ground: in Zlamany’s work, both masked and unmasked, the eyes emphatically have it. “Eye contact is an exciting element and helps you gain trust. And from my Saudi paintings I knew how to get a likeness with just the eyes,” she says. “But this was a lot of fun, because instead of focusing on facial features, there was so much pattern and decoration and abstraction. It was a great break.”

Despite her initial terror at being in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, an epicenter of the virus, Zlamany did a series of 85 socially-distanced portraits of mask wearers on her building’s loading platform, a welcome release from isolation for both the artist and her subjects. And in her most recent series, done in 2020-21, she captured more mask-wearers in upstate New York, some of which are among her liveliest paintings. Take her portrait of Gary, his vibrant blue eyes seen through round black designer glasses, his “Exit Trump” mask in red and white and black color-coordinated with his shirt.

From traditional-costume wearers in Taiwan, (one woman in an ornate headdress) to weathered firefighters in Alaska to young concertgoers in Oxfordshire, Zlamany has documented a swath of the globe in all its diversity. And while the stark images of the nearly obscured Saudi Women in Hijab are haunting, the watercolors of the workers in Alaska, Cuba and Sonoma, humbling, and the portraits of the New York art world members engaging (Zlamany did one a day for an entire year; check out Deborah Kass, Katherine Bradford, Alex Katz, Lilly Wei, David Ebony, Peter Drake, Linda Yablonsky) perhaps the most moving series in the show is “100/100:” the end-of-life portraits done at the Hebrew Home in Riverdale, which has been given its own wall.

Unlike the other portraits – meticulous high-quality prints of the original watercolors considered too fragile to hang – these are the original works, previously framed by the Hebrew Home. Says the artist of this 100-portrait project, “It was probably one of the most emotionally challenging things I’ve ever done in my life. To go in there and deal with life and death at that level. Some people died before I painted them, some people died shortly afterwards. I painted a Holocaust survivor who had been in the camps with her twin sister. I listened to stories that were heartbreaking, but then there were some incredible lessons. All portraits are about mortality, but in many cases these were literally final moments. When I got home, I would be emotionally spent, often in a fetal position. For me it was life-changing.”

Despite their pain and disability, and even the “post-verbal” condition of these subjects, Zlamany has managed to capture not only their frailty but their remarkable level of dignity. The portrait of Mabel, crowned with a blue turban, and looking, it seems, into infinity, is regal. And although Ruth wears oxygen-tank tubes and cannot hold her elderly head erect, the half-smile on her face brings it to life. For Zlamany, this was revelatory. “I never painted wheelchairs before, in the beginning, I tried to flatter people. But then I started to paint what I saw. And people loved it. Instead of having me flatter them, they wanted to see how they looked to me. They wanted to discover who they were through my eyes. They wanted that honesty. Ruth is a painting that tells you that. That is someone who is being seen at the end of their life, with their breathing tubes, yet she is truly delighted by her portrait. I tried to find the person who was there.”

With The Itinerant Portraits project, Zlamany has created a multifaceted celebration of life. The show ends as it begins, with a bang: hanging from the ceiling, so that in order to exit the gallery, you either have to push past her or genuflect below her, is a larger-than-life image of gallerist Julie Torres, wearing a pink “Pussy Power” t-shirt.

“It’s just a subtle thing about the power of women,” Zlamany says. “I am a female artist painting portraits, and traditionally portraiture has been the domain of men. And so I just wanted to assert the power of women: Noura on the front of the barn—a Saudi woman who just got the right to drive. And the power of my own vision as a female artist: the female gaze on the world.” And then some.

The post The Ultimate Un-Selfie: Brenda Zlamany in Millerton appeared first on artcritical.

In the long slow summer of 2020 Kathleen Kucka, artist and former curator of the Shirley Fiterman Art Center at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, headed up to her 1850s country barn in Falls Village, Connecticut to make large scale works that would have been impossible for her in the city. During that time she discovered a unique building in the center of Falls Village that seemed to be lying fallow: A former post office, town hall, plumbing shop, and grocery store, this edifice was a bank just prior to the town acquiring it in the early 1960s. Twenty years ago, the Canaan Board of Selectmen began renting spaces on the first-floor to artists for their studios. Kucka saw a unique opportunity to bring artists she admired in the city to her own doorstep and in the process add life to her Connecticut community. An introduction to the powers that be led to a meeting with the town council, and before she knew it, she had herself a gallery.

Its name, Furnace/Art on Paper Archive refers to the town’s history as an iron smelting center while specifying her curatorial mission.  The 22 by 19 foot gallery has high ceilings that make the room feel airy and welcoming with lots of natural north light. The clean white flat files that hold the “archive” of works on paper by gallery artists, is prominent without taking up wall space and lets visitors know that there is much more to see than immediately meets the eye. In addition to her gallery space, Kucka has also taken hold of the bank vault as an exhibition space, accessed through a hallway where the Falls Village Café is about to be added.

Stephen Maine was the subject of the inaugural show at Furnace/Art on Paper Archive in May. The former Brooklyn-based artist and art critic and his wife, artist Gelah Penn, now live nearby. Titling his show “Cupcake Uptake and the Cloud of Unknowing”, Maine presented a selection of paintings on paper and two canvases.

His process-based abstract idiom combines the arbitrariness of chance with his acute aesthetic sensibility. Maine describes his practice deftly:

Some years ago, it occurred to me that conveying paint to canvas by means of a system that uses printing plates instead of brushes . . .yields the great pleasure of surprise while providing a concrete way to think about color, surface, scale, seriality, figure/ground, original/copy, and the psychology of visual perception.

When I look at these works, the artist Ingrid Calame comes to mind: Her tracings of actual shapes made by the every-day wear and tear on a typical sidewalk results in an all-over abstract pattern with a pristine graphic quality that belies the grittiness of their source. In Maine’s images, however, the organic patterns feel first hand, rather than mediated, in layer upon layer of mind-bending technicolor that protrudes from the surface like the buildup on any well-trodden road. Blobs sit on top of other blobs, creating not only the illusion of dimensionality with drop shadows, but actual dimensionality. They beckon scrutiny and reward the viewer with multifaceted incidents of color and form. His combinations of saturated color create dissonant vibrations that are mesmerizing and seductive and not a little jarring.

On the wall to the left as you walked into the space were four beautifully framed pieces (all of the works on paper are untitled, approximately 22 x 18 inches). They led you to the far wall facing the door and a six and half foot tall canvas, P17-0302 (2017) whose gorgeous aquamarine and ochre complemented, rather than detracted from the works on paper, adding to the sense of galactic immersion he masters in both scales. A further small canvas in bright red and green kept company with several more framed works on paper, as well as unframed paintings from the same series easily accessible in the flat files.

The show has a cohesiveness that illuminates the breadth and depth of possibilities Maine has been able to mine from this very specific and idiosyncratic method and yields an infinite combination of colorful possibilities that inspire reverie at a time we could all do with more of that.

Furnace/Art on Paper Archive, 107 Main Street, Falls Village, CT. Gallery hours: Friday–Sunday, 11:00–4:00

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Weatherford: April 16 to  September 5, 2021, Curated by Bill Arning and Ian Berry
Stevens: March 26 to June 9, 2021, Curated by Brandee Caoba and Lucy Lippard
1606 Paseo De Peralta, Santa Fe NM 87505
sitesantafe.org 

Two exhibitions at this year’s Site Santa Fe present, respectively, an extensive, career retrospective of Mary Weatherford and, in the new side gallery, (SITELab 14,) a two-room glimpse at the career of May Stevens, a local resident for the last twenty years of her life. John Elderfield, speaking on a video at the Gagosian website on Weatherford, who is represented by that gallery, cautions against succumbing to the tyranny of stylistic influence: “as these stylistic things get absorbed, in a way it doesn’t matter…where they come from, all art comes from something.” This mildly disingenuous statement suggesting we check our modernist or post-modernist critical attitudes at the door, is nonetheless something I found helpful in viewing the early careers of each artist. It’s more problematic, however, with their mature works.

A couple of early Weatherford “target” paintings, while accomplished on their own terms, are very much par for the course with this genre, making attempts by the show’s co-curator Ian Berry in a press walk through at Site Santa Fe to suggest temporal and arboreal associations feel belated. Much more convincing for me, in this show of large, amply spaced canvases, is the group of works starting in the 1990s that incorporates imagery, often silkscreened, on the same canvas as a quasi-color-field background.  Of this type, Her Insomnia (1991) and 5:00 a.m. (1992) form a night and day pairing at the far ends of a long gallery. Both feature the vertical, thorny stalks of silkscreened plant photographs and there is a gentle beauty to each reminiscent of effects achieved in Gerhard Richter, Jules Olitski or Donald Sultan.  In the same room hangs Night and Day, (1996) one of several paintings executed on jute, at a distance a dead ringer for Munch’s woodcuts and lithographs of embracing or hand-holding couples. There is even Munch’s obligatory full moon albeit minus the phallic reflection.

Moving deeper into the exhibition we encounter what are generally considered Weatherford’s ground-breaking works and a shift to figuration in a series of paintings of rocks and then caves done when Weatherford returned to art school for her MFA at Bard College. This surely entailed a commendable degree of humility on the part of an artist who at this stage in her career (2006) was carving out prestigious solo exhibitions with clockwork regularity. I get the sense that these paintings afforded Weatherford a new formal syntax, redolent of Cézanne –she never seems to directly utilize Cubist architectonics and sleights of hand – that comes with working from direct observation.

What has really catapulted her to international acclaim and the attention of Gagosian, is surely her series of “stained“ gestural abstract paintings. These typically include slender custom-made neon tubes that traverse the surface of canvases in loose harmony with their attendant electrical wires, both partners typically meeting at floor level to slink along the baseboards to their origins in a white transmitter box decorously aligned off one corner of the canvas. These began in 2012, the result of several visits that made up a teaching residency at CSU Bakersfield in which Weatherford underwent an epiphany of sorts inspired by the prevalence of neon decorating the facades of restaurants and factories. I’m sure the irony wasn’t lost on an artist whose “Bakersfield Project’ yielded sublime paintings from a locale, that inhabitants of the San Joaquin Valley – I was one myself for twenty-five years – considered a byword for car theft and industrial scale agricultural blight! Thus a question posed by the presence of neon  in this recent instantiation, is whether it functions as it might in a Rauschenberg “combine”, transforming the quotidian into something, that by virtue of mimicking painterly signs or marks, achieves a putative sublimity, and is thus subsumed into a larger creative vision; or whether a more deliberate contrast is sought between the mundaneness of neon and the lyrical ferment displayed on canvas after canvas with appreciative side-glances at Morris Louis and Helen Frankenthaler.

I’m uncertain on what level to absorb these paintings, a confusion which Elderfield might be keen to absolve me from. I share his ennui with over-conceptualization of art, and the constant search for the next youthful font of true originality — generally now emblazoned with signs that the artist is up on the latest in digital gizmos or the newest fad in emojis — a search which seemed to have largely petered out sometime in the mid-1980s. Might it not be possible to replough the under-tilled pastures of earlier exemplars, who opened up alluring new territories –Picasso was, in this regard at least, supremely generous – and explore their potential in the patient afterglow of their timeliness, a luxury that Cézanne, Kandinsky, or Jackson Pollock did not afford themselves? And yet I worry that gestural abstraction, color field variations included, has perhaps become too much of a monoculture to yield a lot in this regard.  I am ready to be proved mistaken and Weatherford seems well positioned to do that.

Site Santa Fe inherited this exhibit from the Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College, and has perhaps not landed the cream of Weatherford’s fresh crop, like her recent series of “Railyard” paintings that really do seem to stop us in our tracks. I also think it’s inevitable that an artist who works intuitively, canvas on the floor, should produce an uneven output.  There is much to admire in that; freshness at a premium, working from an authentic core of fallibility, no pat formulae, etc. Munch might be the exemplar in this. In Lovely Day, the artist seems in earnest about the title, inviting narrative association and, beyond the fresh major key chromatic triads can be glimpsed the suggestion of an outdoor gathering of at least three seated or reclining women forming a broken carmine triangle near the picture’s center. These forms are interspliced with ultramarine angular animal or male figures who pay a kind of frolicsome attendance. My question remains whether the tenuous links provided by canvas or exhibition titles and the neon add-ons give us enough to work with, open-endedness notwithstanding, so that gestural abstraction can occupy territory normally reserved for monumental narrative painting, but without the attendant representational slog.

These are accomplished, nuanced paintings, where the skein of paint hangs tantalizingly between a state of floating upon – or immersion within – the raised linen or jute weave that receives it.  The relationship between controlled color saturations and the physical saturation of pigment into the woven surface is something to behold.  Nonetheless the naivety implied in attaching neon strips to gestural color field paintings seems a tad disingenuous. When interviewed, Weatherford generously acknowledges her forbears in the use of neon, but she has perhaps not paid sufficient painterly dues on the canvas, where it counts. Dan Flavin is the first who jumps to mind, but Weatherford’s electric affinities are closer to Arte Povera and the poetry wrested from neon by Jannis Kounellis, Mario Merz and Lucio Fontana. It is almost as if the generosity of interpretation granted the viewer has been afforded too much license in Weatherford’s case, as if the Maenadic wave of energy that yields the painterly saturations, instead of suspending, somewhat blurs her critical sense.

May Stevens, arguably in her heyday in the mid-1970s which saw her involvement with the feminist “Heresies” magazine, featured in a documentary at an adjoining room at Site, produced her best-known paintings, those depicting “Big Daddy”, during that period. It is hard to escape the notion that this level of notoriety remined elusive for the remainder of her long and productive career. Did she crest too early? Exempting her responses to the death of Rosa Luxemburg lasting from 1976-1990, a topic previously addressed by Kathe Kollwitz and R.B. Kitaj, and represented here by Death Squad, (1986) her work since the mid-1980s is her most refined and expressive. The proviso being that works with weighty political and historical subjects are not preferred over those with more elusive content.

Green Field, (1988) is a triumph. The central ghostly figure of May’s mother reconciles the skein of painterly marks which hover deftly between doing their own painterly thing and describing a landscape field at an inclined plane to that of the picture surface. Sea of Words, (2004) a title taken from a canvas not on display, gives the central metaphor for a group of giant acrylic canvases that were Stevens’ focus through the early 1990s. The pictorial dynamics again fuse color field elegance with gently inclined perspectives. We view ghostly boatwomen afloat upon and enmeshed within a slippery veneer of elegantly cursive words that also function as the lit crests of rivulets and runnels. As the century ends these canvases deepen in color and subtlety with the vertical accretion of drips reasserting painterly prerogatives over gentle descriptive imperatives. Her Boats, (1996-7) Galisteo (Creek, New Mexico), (2001) and This Is Not a Landscape, (2004) are exemplary. The museum guard was eager to inform me that “Galisteo” depicts the creek where Stevens cast the ashes of her husband. The words/ripples are now tiny, the drips suggest rain, seepage from the creek and just paint drips. The canvas displays a negotiation of close hues and values that evoke the sublimity of sustained, enduring grief. Indeed, the horizontal blaze of the river that gleams out of the penumbral warmth reminds of the neon strips in some of Mary Weatherford’s paintings. This is a long way indeed from the overt satire of the “Big Daddy” canvas that begins Stevens’ show.

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February 16–April 21, 2019
various locations

The Québec City Biennial is exceptional in many ways: It is certainly the coldest Biennale anywhere in the world; it is entirely bilingual, often known better by its French name ‘Manif d’art;’ and it is indeed the only major biennale in Canada, at least for the moment, Montreal having collapsed and Toronto not launching until September this year.

For a city the size of Québec, its biennial, now in its 9th iteration, has always been unusually ambitious and this year pulled out all the stops by appointing as chief curator Jonathan Watkins, the highly respected director of the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, England. Veteran organiser of many previous biennials including Sydney and Shanghai, Watkins is tipped as the future artistic director of Venice itself.

His poetic title for Manif d’art, Small Between the Stars, Large Against the Sky, was taken from a song by Leonard Cohen – a favorite Québecois – and its broad theme was the interaction of nature and the city, which is particularly pertinent to this town perched above a vast empty landscape.

Whilst extremely international in scope the exhibition happily also included a judicious range of not just Canadian but French-speaking Canadian artists, acknowledging Québec as the heartland of a very specific and intense battle over identity politics. But the Musée national des beaux arts du Québec – which for only the second time ever gave the Biennale a whole pavilion – broke their own firm rule of only exhibiting Québecois- as opposed to Canadian- artists. Of some 100 artists included there, only 20 were Canadians and 6 from Québec itself.

In fact it was a local Québecois, the indomitable Claude Bélanger, who not only created the Biennale back in 2000 but is also largely responsible for transforming his city into a veritable web of contemporary art practice, transforming numerous buildings into a chain of alternative spaces. Most notable in this respect is the  Méduse, a complex of run down factories which he personally rescued and built into a large multi-purpose arts center for some ten organizations. The Méduse is the hub of a city wide regeneration. The Biennale is spread out all over town and if commercial galleries are relatively rare in the mix, by contrast there is a dense network of small non-profit organizations and performance venues. This is a pleasingly old fashioned and genuinely close-knit community of artists of every sort who all know, help and drink with each other, thus transporting one to a Gallic-accented version of the legendary New York art world of the 1940s. Impressively, Bélanger and Watkins decided to give space to twelve young Canadian curators who in turn chose and displayed some 40 Québecois artists, a show within the show. As Bélanger comments, “People are very serious about art in this city but unpretentious and quiet about their own work. Here once can be both modest and ambitious and most importantly everyone is very mutually supportive.”

The bitter cold helps to reinforce this sense of community and the Biennale opened amongst spectacular blizzards which made the public art projects all the more dramatic – it was actually freezing in contrast with another major art world opening of the same weekend, the inaugural Frieze LA. Having personally attended the Antarctic Biennale I can attest that Québec was much colder, indeed both featured a Tomás Saraceno ‘Aerocene’ but there was certainly not enough sun here to make this one fly, unlike at the South Pole.

But the weather only added to the exoticism of the locale, not least crossing the vast icy width of the St Lawrence river to visit Regart located in Lévis, a small arts enclave where Shimabuku was exhibiting his swan pedal boats all the way from Okinawa, Japan.

Watkins has a particular interest in indigenous artists, which is especially appropriate to this part of the world, and convincingly brought together embroideries by the Swedish Sámi tribal elder Britta Marakatt-Labba with work of local peoples including Nunavut artists Manasie Akpaliapik and Shuvinai Ashoona and such ‘First Nation’ practitioners as Marianne Nicolson and Meryl McMaster, the latter staging extraordinary faux-documentary photographs of her own performances. One of the most intriguing Biennale venues is the Huron Wendat museum, 15km outside the city, which is run by the tribe itself and featured installations by indigenous artists Hannah Claus and Sonia Robertson. Their significance was ably explained by the impressive Guy Sioui Durand, one of the few native sociologists and art historians and an expert in his own people’s visual traditions.

Likewise,Le Lieu, an avant-garde performance venue, presented an impressive film installation by Nadia Myre that brought together a panel of indigenous practitioners to talk about their heritage. In many ways Watkins has put together the first example on a widely indigenous Biennale, as groundbreaking in its own way as the groundbreaking 1989 Pompidou Center exhibition, Les Magiciens de la Terre, with a strong and logical emphasis on what is here called ‘autochtone’ practice. One cannot help ponder, nonetheless, the fate of those contemporary French-speaking Canadians who, with the notable exception of Jean-Paul Riopelle, remain one of the few true ‘minorities’ to never have their work included in any such international exhibitions.

Watkins also did well by his own particular minority, the English, with the world premiere of Reanimation a notably impressive new film installation by Oliver Beer; strong sculpture by Haroon Mirza and an exemplary exhibition at the very English Villa Bagatelle pairing paintings by George Shaw (including a brand new and very Canadian image of a man peeing against a tree) with prints by Thomas Bewick, the only dead artist represented. There were, of course, other stand-out works: a window suite of transparent photographs by Beat Streuli; a set of wood block prints by the Leipzig based Christiane Baumgartner; a spooky mise-en-scène of tiny terracotta figures by the Swiss duo Lutz & Guggisberg. There was also a delightfully upbeat display of specially knitted festive winter caps by Polly Apfelbaum, generously made to be given away to each of the other participating artists.

Watkins is well aware of the risks of ‘regionalism’ attached to such events, some artists assuming the Biennale would be in Montreal rather than the city of Québec itself and it remains a surprisingly, perhaps stubbornly, hidden corner of the world. But Watkins turned any such parochialism to his advantage, doing what every Biennale should do, revealing a whole strand of current practice, in this case the indigenous and ‘autochtone’, whilst simultaneously demonstrating the hidden cultural wealth of the host city.

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June 3 to September 2, 2018
10899 Wilshire Blvd., between Westwood Blvd. and Glendon Avenue
Los Angeles, hammer.ucla.edu

Summer in Los Angeles almost inevitably means three things: brutal fires, the Dodgers raising our blood pressure, and – this being an even-numbered year – another iteration of Made in L.A., the Hammer Museum’s buzz-attracting biennial. This year’s, officially the fourth, encompasses 33 artists. Curated by Hammer Senior Curator Anne Ellegood and Erin Christovale, this provocative exhibition is notable for its demographic inclusiveness, with 23 female or non-gender-conforming artists and 21 artists of color. As the curators didn’t nominate a unifying concept, the biennial, spread out across the entire museum, thus seems even more sprawling than usual, leaving the viewer to take each installation on its own terms. Surprises abound. Even so, unlikely dialogues spark. Issues of identity and community weave in and out, along with numerous references to the human body. That confluence of sociological critique and bodily engagement provides the closest thing to a central theme, and gives the exhibition the feeling of a quirky, consciously “woke” travelogue of sorts.

Setting the tone for the show is 97-year old Luchita Hurtado, the latest under-recognized artist to be rediscovered in a “Made in L.A.” biennial, a welcome hallmark of the series. Born in Caracas, and associated with the Dynaton Group in Northern California in the 1940s, Hurtado is represented by a set of compelling, surrealist-inflected paintings from the ‘70s that playfully manipulate perspective, employing parts of her own body – feet, belly, breasts – as elements of landscape. Mysterious, self-affirming, and oddly timeless, the work is a revelation. Although the show is at pains to blur the boundaries of old-fashioned media, two younger painters also memorably twist figuration to their own ends: Christina Quarles, whose looping, semi-abstract protagonists blithely overflow their domestic props, geometric confines, and peeling patterned backdrops; and Celeste Dupuy-Spencer, whose figures navigate their own subjective relationship to both narrative painterly traditions and scenes of traditional Americana. Durham, August 14, 2017, 2017, her image of an overturned, contorted Confederate monument amidst diverse viewers’ legs, is the show’s most telling take on the current political moment. Diedrick Brackens’ striking textile works look to revive and interweave threads of lesser-known African-American history with unsettling glimpses of narrative, while Aaron Fowler’s playful scrap-filled wall reliefs juxtapose automobile fragments of an El Camino, with mirrors, neons, and piñata-like Minion characters, to reflect his own take on American iconography. Inhabiting an altogether more pensive space, Rosha Yoghmai’s folding screen layered with talismans, glass objects, and light projections, meld allusions to the artist’s own Iranian family background and Southern Californian light and space and assemblage art, to quietly haunting effect.

The show invites, and rewards, ambitious visions: Eamon Ore-Giron’s mesmerizing geometric lobby mural, which draws from such disparate sources as Russian Suprematism, Latin American abstraction, musical scores, textiles, and indigenous mythology, rocked its space, distilling its diverse sources into a dynamic formal machinery. While Charles Long’s giddily nightmarish installation conjured art historical specters such as Guston’s smoking klansmen and Munch’s The Scream, conflating tree trunks with phalluses, through a forest of cartoony faces made from giant cross-sections of penises. The image is both goofy and disturbing. A scathing critique of patriarchy’s effect on the environment or a dark joke, once experienced you can’t unsee it. Formally innovative and often pushing limits, Long is the sort of figure you love to see given free rein in a show like this. He’s also currently the subject of his first L.A. solo show in years in the inaugural exhibition of Tanya Bonakdar’s new Los Angeles gallery. Yet it is to the curators’ credit that more intimate visions also had room to shine. One highlight is the work of Linda Stark, whose formally graphic, densely built up oil paintings conjure personal and feminine topographies, with striking technique and an appealing sincerity. At times her work is startling in its vulnerability, as in her emerald green rendering of a woman’s sex and ovaries, with ocean waves for pubic hair, and her witty/loving portraits of cats she has known. Self Portrait With Ray, 2017, an example of the latter, shows a tabby gazing back at the viewer from a circle inset like a third eye in a tearful woman’s forehead. To anyone who’s ever lost a beloved animal friend, or just anyone searching for some actual human feeling in contemporary art, Stark’s precise but soulful canvases resonate powerfully. It’s nice to be touched and dazzled by work, not just dutifully impressed or pleasantly intrigued. Reveling in its diversity of visions, this “Made in L.A.” is an eclectic survey that delivers on all counts.

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May 8 to September 30, 2018
Avenida da República, 300
2750-475 Cascais, Portugal

Any given work by Paula Rego has an electric charge at its core. No matter how familiar one might be with the individual piece, or how long ago it was made, it remains alive and ready to shock. Folktales and Fairy Tales spans five decades, from drawings made in the 1970s found recently in a drawer to Sophie’s Misfortunes, a painting completed six months ago. This large, freely exuberant work is the fruit of a lifetime in the studio. The museum devoted to Rego’s work is in Cascais, a tranquil seaside town outside Rego’s native Lisbon. The building itself is a masterpiece by prize-winning architect Edouardo Souto de Moura, an elegant fortress in gorgeous rusty pink set among trees, its pyramidal roof structures echoing historical Portuguese palaces and monasteries.

The exhibition, curated by Catarina Alfaro and Leonor de Oliviera, is a feast of originality, with paintings, pastels, drawings, collages, and extra treats like a life-size papier maché pig in satin clothes, used as a studio prop; a collection of Rego’s exquisitely sewn grotesque figures; and the actual heavy volume of fairy tales by Charles Perrault, illustrated by Gustav Doré, which first captivated and, she has often said, terrified the artist as a child.

Brought up for a while by her grandmother and a nanny, Rego was exposed in her formative years to stories that have had a life-time’s grip on the artist’s imagination. Her parents sent her to London in her teens to get her away from Salazar’s repressive regime of ‘unquestionable certainties’ which demanded either fascist values or turning a blind eye to torture and pervasive dishonesty. In London, where she still lives, she met her future husband, the painter Victor Willing, then a star student at the Slade and friend of Francis Bacon. In an extraordinary, highly praised film made by their son Nick Willing, Secrets and Stories, Rego tells how everyone knew that all the men in Portugal went to brothels. Two piercingly good drawings of a procuress with her clients and a prostitute enjoying a rest show indolence and mercenary calculation, sleaziness and irony. Seen through Rego’s eyes, they are ultimately working women.

I asked Nick whether he thought that his father was his mother’s Muse. According to Rego, she adored and couldn’t help obeying him from the start, and when he died in 1988, aged 60, after years of suffering from multiple sclerosis, her first fear was that she wouldn’t be able to paint without him. She almost never directly drew him – although he made many beautiful nude paintings of her – but there is one portrait of him in the exhibition, sitting at a family meal. But a great deal of Rego’s work is, actually, about caring for him, and watching him being cared for by others, in paintings of strong young women vigorously dressing a limp soldier, father or brother figure, nearly suffocating him with their arms and pushing themselves up against the male figure’s crotch. And when the weak male figure is depicted standing alone with his bag, waiting to leave on a journey, he represents the dying Vic. But Nick pointed out that a female artist’s male muse is very different from, say, Picasso’s egoistic passion for a piece of flesh on the beach, and that all his mother’s work is imbued with the presence of his father and her feelings for him.

Rego’s use of myth and folktale is quite similar to Jung’s analytical approach: For both, the stories are a way to confront the self and access the unconscious. Rego’s practice is based in drawing from life. People pose for her in the studio, often having to hold extremely demanding positions. According to Nick, the living, changing presence of the model is important to her. In 1985, Lila Nunes came from Portugal as an au pair for the family. For years, she has been not only Rego’s model but a kind of alter ego. Paintings of her can be viewed, almost, as self portraits.

Snow White and her Stepmother (1995), despite its title, could as well be a procuress with her novice. Or else, in line with the original story, it could represent a jealous stepmother trying to prevent her stepdaughter from growing up. Two strong, coarse-featured women are involved in an act of strange intimacy. The more sophisticated elder, wearing a tight dress and high heels, takes charge, stooping to help the other remove, or perhaps put on, a sensible pair of white knickers. The younger one is a simpler and more compliant type—in fact it is Lila, wearing a shapeless version of the dress from Walt Disney’s “Snow White” and a child’s rumpled white socks on her large feet. Facial expressions are hard to fathom in a work charged with sexuality. Violence is in the air, but what exactly is happening is anybody’s guess.

Rego’s work defies explanation. Even the Abortion series of paintings and prints from 1998 – not included in the exhibition, these are among her most explicit and strongly focused works, made as a passionate protest against Portugal’s anti-abortion laws – extends far beyond its subject, and is intrinsically ambiguous. The small prints were easily portable and widely shown around the country, and did indeed help sway public opinion and ultimately change the law. Together with images that protest human trafficking and female genital mutilation, these are the works, according to Rego, of which she is most proud. But although they have earned her a following among feminists and human rights activists in Britain and Portugal, the crouching, writhing, agonized women she has depicted, she has observed, could as well be opening up to a lover as to the abortionist’s knife.

The post Strange Intimacies: A Survey of Paula Rego in Cascais, Portugal appeared first on artcritical.

Is Buffalo the Next Berlin? As the capital of Germany, obviously not. But in terms of an art city, rich in cultural associations with a thriving bohemian sensibility, Buffalo can already begin to think of itself as a new Philadelphia: a serious contender, that is, for artists priced out of New York who just need a place to hang their hats and make work.

In a recent trip there, however, Berlin kept coming up. I met more than one young artist who had spent time there before putting down roots in, or reconnecting with, Buffalo.  Nestled on the border with Canada in the western reaches of New York State, and 90 minutes from JFK, Buffalo is a rust belt town that’s closer to Cleveland than Manhattan in more than just miles. But that is not a bad thing in forging an alternative art city. Philly has never shaken the patronizing notion of being “the sixth borough”, unable fully to develop an identity distinct from New York City. Think of Buffalo, instead, as Hudson with warehouses — upstate and then some — and its burgeoning art life might beckon.

Buffalo enjoys a spot on art world maps thanks to significant museums and extraordinary architectural heritage. Frank Lloyd Wright masterpieces attest to the times when the home of a world’s fair and the first city to be fully electrified was a cosmopolitan hub. The SUNY Buffalo art department has enjoyed international attention since producing Pictures Generation luminaries such as Cindy Sherman and Robert Longo. Museum-wise, even a young English critic in 1987 knew to stop here, en route from Toronto to NYC, to catch the superlative holdings of Abstract Expressionism at the Albright-Knox. I was back in Buffalo, a newly minted New Yorker,  fifteen years later for a superb Modigliani exhibit. A massive expansion of the museum is now planned for 2019 with a new pavilion by the architects OMA/Shigematsu. And since that last visit, a new museum has been added to the mix: the Burchfield Penney Art Center, on the Albright-Knox’s doorstep, showcasing Charles Burchfield, Buffalo’s most famous artistic son, with related contemporary exhibitions. This time round, however, what lured me toward Niagara Falls was living art.

The painter Rebecca Allan (a longstanding and valued artcritical contributor) hails from Buffalo but hasn’t exhibited here since 1986. This summer she showed her ecologically-informed lyrical landscape paintings at Anna Kaplan Contemporary, one of several young galleries active in the city. Last fall, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, New York, staged an in-depth exhibition of this series, curated by Cynthia Bronson Altman. Paintings in her Buffalo show, titled “Debris Fields”, derived their toxic beauty from the arbitrary waste and negligence of industrial and mining sites. While abstract in compositional strategies, their paint handling has a lush naturalism that recalls the late Robert Berlind. Burchfield is also clearly an inspiration, with his transcendentalist meditations on the use and abuse of nature. But in the collisions of synthetic and organic palettes and tight painterly negotiations of layers and twists, Allan mostly channels the New Mexico landscapes of Richard Diebenkorn. Her paintings are pervaded by a provocatively gentle sense of foreboding.

Allan was also included in an earlier installation of paintings at the fabled Hotel Henry, the H. H. Richardson-designed former New York State Asylum that lay dormant for decades until being masterfully converted to boutique hotel usage last year by Deborah Berke Associates. Architectural Digest had cited Anna Kaplan Contemporary as part of a Buffalo renaissance in which the reclamation of the landmarked psychiatric hospital plays a central role. Kaplan has joined forces with two other women, Elisabeth Samuels of Indigo Art and Emily Tucker of Benjaman Contemporary, to launch Resource:Art, a consultancy that places contemporary art in institutional and pop-up venues. In the second floor public spaces of the Henry they have established a series of exhibitions of kunsthalle quality, with imaginatively installed, interlinked displays of significant local artists. Richardson and Berke are clearly the curators’ friends: the setting could not be more spectacular, well-lit and generous with wall space. With its Romanesque spires and the sinister decay of its unreclaimed wings, the historic asylum might seem the epitome of the gothic horror loony bin, but in its day Richardson’s hospital was a model of progressive treatment: the sumptuous hallways were designed for inmates to learn socializing skills. These now provide incredible gallery opportunities that put paid to any negative connotations of “hotel art”. Especially prized spots are the semi-circular walkways linking the main body of the hospital to its wings, which are especially well suited to sculpture. The handsomely enigmatic works of Kevin Kegler, for instance, managing to simultaneously recall  Martin Puryear and Louise Bourgeois, exploit a master craftsman’s years as a boat builder. The Light Will Blind You (2017) is a smooth totemic construction, at once face-like and functional, with a suggestively luminous niche-orifice at its golden core.

At the June 8th reception for the latest Resource:Art display I met Kegler and his daughter, Kyla Kegler, recently returned from years of studying and dance performance in Berlin. Kyla Kegler  took me to see her solo exhibition, “Feel Me: How to dwell in daily sensation, a manual for finding feeling” at the BOX Gallery on Main Street in downtown Buffalo. It is an expansion of her recent degree show at the University at Buffalo. In her own words, her work “probes the phenomenon of haptic sensation through visual, audio, text, and performative experiences.” Her installation consists of uninvitingly utilitarian MDF furnishings and accoutrements for various massage therapies. At one end of the gallery, under an orange neon of the word “Feel”, is a textured wall of cast breast-like forms that visitors are invited to interact with as they choose. Accompanying audio, delivered in deadpan, corporate voice-of-god tones, describes physical and spiritual benefits to be derived from the therapies under offer. Kegler’s project, which was also just recently shown at Kunstraum in Brooklyn as “Three Acts, Three Scenes: Your Care, My Care, Careful Care,” recalls Maryam Jafri’s “War on Wellness”, seen earlier this year at Kai Matsumiya, although Kegler’s intentions are more ambivalently poised between earnestness and irony than the aggressively deconstructive Jafri.  

Kegler lives in a sprawling and — to this Manhattanite’s eye — to-die-for loft downtown, on the same block as the 1912 Electric Tower. Buffalo is a city not only of architectural gems — besides Lloyd Wright’s pioneering residences there are the Guaranty Building skyscraper by his mentor Louis Sullivan, the recently landmarked grain elevators of Silo City, the Saarinens’ Kleinhans Music Hall — but also of miles upon miles of warehouses and mills screaming with potential. Inevitably, artists, in their perennial quest for viable places to live, work and exhibit, are leading the way in reclamation, but the problem is an embarrassment of riches. How many kunsthalles can a city of quarter of a million support?

But that’s not any individual artist or entrepreneur’s problem. Ryan Arthurs is another returning native: he received his M.F.A. in photography from Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2012 and had been teaching at Harvard and elsewhere. He held a pop-up exhibition, Liberty, during Buffalo’s pride week at the end of May that, luckily, extended beyond its intended 72 hours for me to catch sight of it. The title of the show recalls the furloughs granted by the military while playing on the sense of the artist taking liberties with his materials, as well as celebrating liberation. Arthurs explores issues of masculinity and sexuality in prints and installations that delicately juggle appropriation and transformation. He has troves of historic family photographs of young servicemen at leisure whose grainy textures he processes through lithography with overlays of geometric shapes, reminiscent of Ellsworth Kelly, in pastel hues. He also presents collages made from vintage gay postcards by the pioneering Bob Mizer that he has collected in depth. He artfully arranges his diverse, variously framed and pinned materials on printed wallpapers, adding a further layer to his installation. Freedom to experiment with what could be prohibitively expensive printing techniques is something crucial to his work, which is where the move to Buffalo adds another dimension of liberty, by providing space and resources beyond his reach in Boston.

Arthurs’ show was staged in a recently renovated store belonging to Frits Abell, the developer behind a burgeoning portfolio in the Five Points neighborhood on the West Side. There’s already a popular wine shop, a cafe, a Pilates studio and other mixed use, commercial and residential projects spreading out from this intersection of avenues. Savoring the upbeat vibe of the Five Points bohemian hub on a cool summer afternoon prompted the thought: to build an arts metropolis, it takes a village.

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If Vasari were to update his “Lives of the Artists” for the 20th Century, Marta Jungwirth and Günter Brus would serve well as the Janus faces of painterly abstraction in Vienna in the period 1945-2000. Both Jungwirth and Brus, born in 1940 and 1938, respectively, have some basic similarities. For all intents and purposes they missed the ravages of World War II and spent their formative years in Vienna. And, if we assess their actual paintings, both fall neatly into the parameters of an open and gestural abstract expressionism. It’s amazing how many paths can lead to a similar result, some of which can include a spell in prison for publicly masturbating while singing the Austrian national anthem while covered in feces (Brus). The exhibition “Unrest After the Storm,” at the Belvedere 21 (February 2 to August 12), is revelatory in its illustration of Brus’s brave, political, and rebellious practice up to the point where he brings brush to canvas, offering exhaustive but never dull documentation of his actions in the form of hundreds of sequential photographs and the brilliant films of Kurt Kren. The Jungwirth retrospective at the Albertina (March 2 to June 3), a relatively staid affair in keeping with this bourgeois painter’s life, presents for the first time a much-needed visual history of this artist’s work. Her politics were subtler, questioning gender in terms of subject matter and medium.

Jungwirth, on display at the oppressively aristocratic Albertina, weaves in and out of representational and abstract imagery, finding herself most comfortable on the cusp of recognizeability as in the series “Spittelauer Lände,” based on the topography of Vienna. While almost pure abstraction, they have a barely discernible, almost secret visual model. Over the past 40 years Jungwirth shows a remarkable consistency of gesture, and while her aesthetic is that of brief markings, short slashes, and almost text-like gestures, reminiscent of Cy Twombly and early Philip Guston, her primary abstract concern is the density of her marks. This seems related both to her devotion to paper as a substrate (with gouache and oil), a medium that responds keenly by crinkling and undulating under whatever color media is applied, and her fixation on real world subjects: portraits, objects, and locations. Her pencil on trace paper dissection of the contours of a washing machine, Indesit (1975), is an ironic, but very serious, diagrammatic consideration of a “female subject.” These graphite edges, curves and stray marks have the same purposeful execution as her brush strokes in her later massive works on paper such as Here and Now and Never Again III (1982-83). These strokes, marks and blots gain heft and body in her work, often becoming fraught throbbing maelstroms of color. An untitled work from 2014, from the series Female Regents of the Old Men’s Almhouse, Frans Hals 1664, focuses this energy onto an arresting reinterpretation of Hals’s witty group portrait, forcing, or allowing, the old master’s five proper ladies to stand up and jostle, or even dance.

Brus’s paintings only comprise one sixth of the entire retrospective at Belvedere 21. This contemporary art museum, housed in a glass and steel pavilion designed in 1958 by Karl Schwanzer, stands in stark contrast to the patrician surroundings of Jungwirth’s exhibition. Brus’s career in performance is bookended between the early paintings and the later graphic works called Bild-dichtungen. These latter are extensive and colorful text-and-image works incorporating poetry and found verbiage (handwritten or printed) and illustrated by doodles and diagrams as well as meticulously rendered drawings. Dating from 1960, when Brus first came into contact with American Abstract Expressionism via the artist Joan Merritt, the three large, strong, black and white untitled abstractions from 1960, 1961 and 1963, respectively, seek to contain the artist’s frenetic energy. Like Jungwirth, Brus worked on the floor and on paper. Unlike his Viennese contemporary, however, he chose to deal only in absolutes color-wise, and this choice continues into his performance period as well. In the films “Ana” (1964), “Aktion Brus” (1965), and “Wiener Spaziergang” (1965), white paint expands from the proscribed painting surfaces to cover the artist and the space and individuals he lived with, also mimicked by his penchant for rejecting social mores. These films and their attendant photo-documentation are still inspiring now, and one of Brus’s great contributions is the diversity and spectrum of material he has manufactured over his lifetime, redefining the parameters of what is art.

For Brus, there is a notable retreat into a largely graphic and illustrative practice that may have been a necessary de-escalation after burning out from his intense performances of the ‘60s. The Bild-dichtungen seem a bit lost; derivative of Ensor, Schinckel, popular advertising, and a combination of Freudian and Jungian psycho-analytic imagery. Conversely, Jungwirth’s most recent works are as fresh as anything she has ever created. Standing between these veterans of the fertile painting scene of post-war Vienna, Brus appears to accept painting, and indeed any static medium as a necessary evil, while Jungwirth has instead blended herself entirely into the picture.

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November 16, 2017 to March 10, 2018
87 Lever Street, London EC1V, thisisarcade.art 

Clive Hodgson possesses a comedian’s flair for transposing what is expected for what is not. Under the terms of either minimalist rigor or lyrical invention, towards both of which his work nods, his ostensibly failed paintings would appear to be reprehensible, if not cynical. Of course, the idea of intentionally bad or incomplete painting is not new, but making such work also does not appear to be his overriding aim.

A key work in his show at Arcade, resembling a partially printed silkscreen composed of blue, orange and red rectangles, makes one think of Color Field painting redone by Ikea. It is a strong example of an unusual and consistent aspect of his work which is the creation of a shallow and ambiguous space in which forms lie neither flat nor have much autonomy. Unlike Raoul De Keyser, to whom he is sometimes compared, Hodgson is not interested in deep illusionistic space. And similarly, unlike Robert Ryman, who has also been invoked, he does not restrict himself to the actuality of material accretions. Rather Hodgson’s forms sit unevenly, partially submerged like the flotsam they resemble.

For Hodgson, the familiarity of rectangles as elements of abstract painting is a carapace to be subverted, compelling him to launch a rescue mission into this initial conceit. The rectangles are transparent, overlapping and partially filled in. Arbitrarily punctuating the painting are green and pink bobbles, one of which is hatched perversely with thin brushstrokes. This conflation of ornament and abstraction is a disorientating and typical aspect of Hodgson’s painting, through which received notions of autonomy are substituted with superfluous or illusionistic flourishes. Flourishes, furthermore, that find themselves relieved of any former charges to elaborate or convince.

Resulting from this aggressive abnegation is an enervated world haunted by the potential for symbolism. Concentric rings, a perennial motif for Hodgson, are reprised as an easy hollow target whose pink periphery holds more allure than its gaping bull’s-eye (centers are often empty in his work). Another painting from 2017 contains a framed pink window in which hangs a dull, haphazard constellation of torpid discs. This window-like space borders on the illusionistic but any such possibility is undermined by the superimposition of oversized text and ethereal scrunches of printed blue paint. Often, particularly in works from 2008, the paintings resemble backgrounds to images, rather than images in their own right. Within these barren sites Hodgson’s light skating touch as well as his unlikely methods of application (bath sponges are not uncommon) suggest low-level activity that seems to teeter between fruition and dissipation. Icon painting is sometimes recalled but the constituent parts seem salvaged from scraps and trash. Stencils are frequently used to imply absence of form and flimsy price tags are used as stars. His forms are a shadow version of what might be expected from this or that type of painting. Taken together in a single work they posit an airless humdrum world lacking in convictions.

Critical literature on Hodgson often focuses on signatures and dates as painting motifs but these are always subservient to an overriding aim of subversion. Often wispy, his moniker is more speculative than Ryman’s while its use is more varied than the overtly signed paintings by many of his contemporaries. For Hodgson, it is not quite an ironic addition nor is it, as in Josh Smith’s case, a painterly motif to be emptied through repetition. Rather, it acts as a flexible foil, responsive to and altered by whichever environment it finds itself in. Some of the recent works sees it integrated within the other elements suggesting that it is another instance of intentional insipidness. Sometimes it is upended or reversed, conflating the artist’s identity with flippant gesture. In the paintings from 2008, name and date are often isolated in a ruled or masked off section, sanctioning what happens elsewhere while maintaining a wary distance.

The Arcade show was presented in two parts: in the early days of the new year, recent works were switched for paintings from 2008 in order to mark the gallery’s tenth anniversary. This changeover allowed for an examination of the artist’s development, albeit between arbitrary points. It would be interesting to see a wider range of these signed paintings and particularly so to see the seldom exhibited figurative works which have sometimes been produced alongside them. The recent paintings are in a higher color key and are more open and emphatic in gesture. Perhaps the most significant difference between the groups on show is the complete lack of revision in the recent works suggesting an editing process subsequent to the work’s completion.

Hodgson’s predecessors are painters who value economy and who speculate recklessly upon established pictorial concerns, testing the limits of their viability. Roger Hilton’s brash contrapuntal semi-figurations are one example and Francis Picabia’s transparencies which mimic but then repudiate religious imagery, are another. Like Hodgson, both these artists are uncertain of their ends and embrace painterly and imagistic contingency as a means towards their work’s determination. Hodgson’s painting method is additive and the clarity and improbability of each decision in relation to the last is where his work succeeds or truly fails.

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January 28 – May 6, 2018
2814 Wilshire Boulevard, between Stanley and Curson Avenues
Los Angeles, cafam.org

That old dog, clay, seems to be pulling off an impressive array of surprising new tricks. While ceramics remains among the most venerable – and stubbornly tactile – of mediums, that doesn’t mean that it has been resistant to the conceptual upheavals within the ceramics world of recent decades. If anything, this ambitious survey exhibition suggests, the current moment seems to be a highly fruitful one for practitioners pushing the medium in all sorts of new directions, through promiscuous hybrid forms involving installation, mixed media, technology, and even time-based performance.

Intended as the first iteration of a ceramic biennial, ”Melting Point” is at its best in examining the overlap between the medium’s allegorical impulses and its roots in functional form. Featuring 22 artists from around the country, ranging from established figures to recent graduates, the show sprawls insouciantly across the museum’s three levels, flaunting a panoply of stances, scales and sensibilities, from the ragged to the glazed, the distilled to the distressed, to whatever unlikely unions of the above.

The interrogative tone for the show was set at the opening, with a performance work by 28-year-old Armando Cortes, who laboriously dragged his own weight in raw clay several long blocks from the sidewalk in front of LACMA, finally hauling it up the museum’s stairs as it scuffed the floor: literally lugging the burden of the medium’s complex legacy. Titled El Peso de La Tierra (2017-18), the work melds references to Chris Burden’s infamous ordeal-performances of the 1970s and the medium’s proletarian roots, through the muscular immediacy of manual labor. The show’s curators identified a trio of themes that link the works: “Anti-Disciplinary Approaches,” “Ephemerality,” and “New Sociopolitical Interpretations.” But these groups were considered loosely and many works, like Cortes’s performance, embraced more than one category.

Stanton Hunter’s works overtly invite audience participation. In his series Untitled Unvesseled II (2018), he asks viewers to drip water onto vessels of unfired clay, allowing them to crumple over time. Wayne Perry courts viewer reaction through placement; setting out sagging clumps and clusters of small pots along the museum’s staircase, and other peripheral spaces, interspersing white and black vessels among groups of terra cotta, he employs his notably imperfect vessels as a loose form of social allegory. The dramatic works of Cheryl Ann Thomas also revel in their formal imperfection; made by firing large, thin columns of clay to the point of collapse, and evoking giant swathes of gauze, they derive poignant form and purpose from their surrender to gravity.

Emphatically allowing his process to mold his forms, Walter McConnell, a professor at Alfred University and one of the show’s elder statesmen, presented a quixotic meditation on nature and culture. Set off by the plastic curtain enclosing it, his pillar of flowery forms, called A Florid Heap (2018), remains perpetually moist and unfinished, in a self-contained terrarium of sorts. To anyone still expecting ceramics to be prim and neatly allusive, McConnell offers a sharp theatrical rebuke. The show does include its share of LA-based ceramic hotshots. Among them: Matt Wedel, with his monumental rocklike desert blooms; Julia Haft-Candell, whose twisty infinity forms interweave references to sketches, knots and bows; and Kristen Morgin, whose remarkable trompe l’oeil tableaux of paint cans and ragged toys and tattered old paperbacks and record albums conjure the detritus of family attics or basements, the flotsam and jetsam of childhood memory.

Patsy Cox, who also curated this year’s Scripps Ceramic Annual, merges technological and formal innovation. Her concoctions of tiny top-like shapes, multiplied via 3-D printing, suggest at once loopy baskets of plastic toy flowers, blow-ups of cellular organisms, and fractal abstractions. In terms of sheer diversity of surface and technique, the show offers a startling range, from the giddily baroque fixtures of Anthony Sonnenberg to the vividly colorful, oozily distressed cups of Brian Rochefort. Despite their roots in traditional functional forms, the subversive intent of these works is intoxicating–though you surely wouldn’t want to drink from them.

The more banal implications of ceramic as a vehicle for mass-market serving ware or tchotchkes are addressed adroitly through the works of Jonathan Mess, who offered cross-sections of found ceramics, like geological samples; and Emily Sudd, whose bisected vases were stuffed with diverse ceramic gleanings and then fired to their melting points. Adding hints of narrative to the mix, Susannah Biondo-Gemmell’s halved porcelain figures in chunks of lava, laid carefully on their sides, oscillated between blobby hollow abstractions and elegiac reliquaries.

Ling Chun abstractly invokes the subject of gender in teasingly organic wall reliefs cheerfully adorned with spattered pastel colors, enigmatic orifices and plaits of colored hair. The diminutive works of Jennifer Ling Datchuk, meanwhile, from her Making Women series, wryly incorporate tiny wigs of real human hair in varied hues into dainty porcelain discs suggesting hand-wrought make-up brushes, cookies, wafers or nipples–willfully feminine confections for consumption.

Jami Porter Lara’s stately, black-glazed jugs of pit-fired foraged clay are particularly notable in the way they conjure a spectrum of unexpected references, from a uterus to a pair of fists clutching a pipe, to, what exactly: an alien vacuum cleaner? Claiming a space between the sacred and the mundane, she melds the banality of soda bottles with the solemnity of funeral urns, all the while flaunting prominent screwhead nozzles. Her works project sculptural stature without ever minimizing their identity as vessels.

The allegorical possibilities of ceramic were perhaps most potently interpreted by Saint Louis-based artist Kahlil Robert Irving, whose installation, titled Protest: 1883 / United States vs. Harris (Part of the series Undocumented) (2018), formed the centerpiece of the museum’s third floor. At once so subtle it could be breezed over, and physically expansive, at five by five by 12 feet, the work offered an array of hundreds of black glazed stoneware vessels of diverse shapes, set out on a raised wooden platform at roughly eye level where they can’t all be taken in at once. (The scaffold brings its own allusions, from viewing platform to gallows). I took the work to be a prose poem to blackness and a striking allegory of individuality and collectivity. Unpretentious in its language and almost hiding in plain sight, Irving’s silent, querying multitude proves haunting. At once traditional and provocative, nuanced and declarative, it attests to the durability of ceramics as a vehicle for contemporary sociopolitical commentary, even while parading its all-too eloquent fragility.

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